We lived in the oldest house on the street. Never owned it, but rented it for the entire 20+ years my parents lived there. The rent was $45 a month and it was never increased. I always believed that was because no one else would ever rent it, but it may have been because dad took care of all the necessary repairs.
When I was little, my brother and I used to race marbles from the front room to the kitchen. The floor slanted just enough it would pick up speed for the great race. All we had to do was release the marbles. I don’t know if it was because of the marble races or what t was, but dad decided to level the floors. I guess it wasn’t possible to level the entire house, so he leveled each room individually, When completed there was a step from one room to the next and they weren’t all the same height. One had to be careful when moving from one room to the next.
It seemed obvious that the neighborhood had dramatically changed some time after our house was built. All the others were reasonably nice homes. My friend David lived in a house with servant quarters up stairs and a narrow set of back stairs down to the kitchen. They never had a servant, but the house was neat to play in.
Rumor had it that our house used to be a neighborhood store (convenience store in current terms). That looked right. The largest room in the house was the first one from the sidewalk. It has an outside entrance. You entered the main part of the house by following the porch around to the right. We used that front room as a bedroom and combination storage space. I know Dean and I kept bikes in there.
Since nearly all of the family seemed to move around to different bedrooms, I eventually slept in each one. Dean and I started in the middle bedroom, I then moved to the back when I first got my own room and in high school I moved to the largest bedroom, in front. I can’t remember why.
There was no furnace, or wall heaters or any kind of central heat. Dad put a coal burning stove up in the early fall and took it down in the early spring. The thing put out enough to heat the entire house, if you didn’t close a door. While that was strange in our neighborhood, it was more surprising that there was no hot water tank. All hot water was heated on the kitchen stove. The more you need, the larger the pots or more of them. Baths were taken in a round galvanized tub that hung on the wall in the bathroom. Baths were taken on Saturday night and everyone used the same water — from youngest to oldest. Dad was the biggest and dirtiest so he was last.
The house entrance & Oak tree I seem to remember starting out with a coal-burning kitchen stove. I was still in elementary school when we converted to electricity. The first icebox was exactly that, a box that held ice. The ice man would deliver a large block of ice carrying it in with a big pick like clamp and dripping through the house. The first washing machine we have was the galvanized tub and a scrub board. We then moved on to a wringer washer. Mom would feed the clothes through the wringer and I would pull them out on the other side. She was constantly worried that I would get my fingers caught in the wringer. The dryer was always a close line in the side yard.
Dad grew up on a farm and had the farmer still in him. Several neighbors had small gardens, but out entire back yard had been turned into garden. Us boys were expected to turn the soil over in the spring, weed during the growing season and harvest at the right time. I didn’t mind the harvest. I loved shucking corn, snapping beans and shelling peas. I don’t know why we grew strawberries. What few we got were terrific, but the birds ate most of them. We had two kinds of potatoes and carrots, beets, lettuce and a few other things. Mom canned just about everything. Once we bought a freezer, corn on the cob when right in there. The basement was cool enough to store potatoes all year. It was most likely originally a root cellar. The only entrance was from the outside back of the house.
That was the only house I remember living in while in Omaha. I was told I was brought home from St. Joseph’s Hospital to an apartment. We moved to Webster Street while I was still an infant.
I returned to Omaha about 1998 and drove through the old neighborhood. Creighton University’s School of Dentistry now sits on was our property. I could still see the slope of the land that was part of our sledding run. St. Joseph’s Hospital relocated right across the street where Webster school used to be. Webster dead-ends at 28th and over the wall is a freeway going I don’t know where. 28th Street looks more like and alley. While there is an entrance to the hospital on Webster, the main entrance is on 30th.
There is one neighborhood house sitting in the back parking lot of the hospital where it is surrounded by cement. I understand the owner would not sell to the hospital so they bought up everything around him hemming the house in. His street is gone. To leave his place he drives through St. Joseph’s parking lot. If he were to change his mind now, I doubt they would want it. It is nothing but a postage stamp to them and could only be added to their parking lot. That would be expensive. He missed out.
Things change and the world moves on. I have no regrets about the old home being removed. It should have happened before I left. I am surprised it never fell down. The shale siding had several broken pieces where the tarpaper poked through. It was sad to lose the giant Oak tree. We has various swings there through my entire childhood. Even had a trapeze for a while during the time I dreamed of being in the circus. My niece, Wanda and I, did all kinds of tricks on that thing. I was the holder and she did the tricks. I did enjoy that I learned to fall backwards off the trapeze and catch myself by my legs.
In spite of the condition of the house, it has good memories. I remember when I first left that I would never again climb up on that roof and over into the Oak tree. To bad. That was neat.
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